Robert McMurray

I've mentioned in previous blog posts that I use the Windows WebDAV Redirector a lot. (And believe me, I use it a lot.) Having said that, there are a lot of registry settings that control how the Windows WebDAV Redirector operates, and I tend to tweak those settings fairly often.

One of my colleagues here at Microsoft, Emmanuel Boersma, just reminded me of an email thread that we had several weeks ago, where a customer had asked him how they could tell if FTPS was being used on their FTP server. He had pointed out that when he looks at his FTP log files, the port number was always 21, so it wasn't as easy as looking at a website's log files and looking for port 80 for HTTP versus port 443 for HTTPS. I had sent him the following notes, and I thought that they might make a good blog. ;-)

I had a question from someone that had an interesting scenario: they had a series of reports that their manufacturing company generates on a daily basis, and they wanted to automate uploading those files over FTP from their factory to their headquarters. Their existing automation created report files with names like Widgets.log, Sprockets.log, Gadgets.log, etc.

This blog is designed as a complement to my FTP and LDAP - Part 1: How to Use Managed Code (C#) to Create an FTP Authentication Provider that uses an LDAP Server blog post. In this second blog, I'll walk you through the steps to set up an Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS) server, which you can use with the custom FTP LDAP Authentication provider that I discussed in my last blog.

Over the past few years I've created a series of authentication providers for the FTP 7.5 service that ships with Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7, and is available for download for Windows Server 2008. Some of these authentication providers are available on the http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/590/developing-for-ftp-75/ website, while others have been in my blog posts.

In this last appendix for my blog series about using SSL with IIS 6, I'll discuss processing a certificate request by using Windows 2003 Certificate Services. When you are running a certificate server for your network environment, you will need to physically issue the certificates that clients will request from your certificate server. There is a way that you can configure certificate services to automatically issue certificates, but I'd advise against that, unless you are only issuing certificates for testing purposes. If so, then you should read the Set the default action upon receipt of a certificate request topic on Microsoft's TechNet website.

In this second appendix for my blog series about using SSL with IIS 6, I'm going to discuss obtaining the root certificate from Windows Server 2003 Certificate Services. By way of explanation, obtaining a root certificate is one of the most important steps for servers or clients that will use certificates that you issue. While this step is not necessary on the server where you installed Certificate Services, it is absolutely essential on your other servers or clients, because this step will allow those computers to trust your certificate server as a Certificate Authority (CA). Without that trust in place, you will either receive error messages or SSL simply won't work.

I needed to take a short break from my blog series about using SSL with IIS 6 in order to work on some other projects, but I wanted to finish the series by giving you a few appendices that give you some additional details that you might want to know if you are using SSL with IIS 6.